Sunday, October 1, 2017

Islands of mercy in a sea of self-sabotage

This space is seemingly chock-full of criticisms of
public figures and yet….

There are other compassionate, and unbelievably
generous acts of unexpected kindness being offered and delivered by human
“angels” every day that never see the light of day.

We can likely agree that the headlines generated by
public figures do not demonstrate our ‘best’ selves, and grind away at any
residual sliver of confidence and optimism we have left about “humanity’s
greatness’.

I just left a conversation with a co-worker whose
vehicle, needed for her work, had recently sprung a leak of antifreeze from the
radiator. After borrowing her sister’s vehicle, and booking hers into the
repair shop, she got it back with a repair bill of some $500. Confident the
problem was now in her past, she parked the repaired vehicle in her driveway,
only to come out to use it next, to find a large pool of antifreeze on the
driveway. When she called the repair shop, there was no apology, and no
acknowledgement of any missed assignment on their part. Nevertheless, she had
it towed back, not a small task given the distances and the variety of steps
required.

Upon her discovery of the pool, she also noticed an approaching good
Samaritan who offered to replace her car with his, to complete with her the
duties she had to perform, and then to drive her to her sister’s home to pick
up the same vehicle she had used when the problem first arose. This kindness
probably took well over one hour, and even then this good Samaritan still had
another hour drive to his home.

Amazing, inspiring and surprising….and well worth
re-telling!

And, following a meeting last evening, I came out to
realize that I was missing my car keys, while my spouse waited for me to pick
her up at the mall, on the other side of town. To my amazement, one of the
people attending the meeting offered and then delivered on the offer to drive
me to where my wife was waiting, drive both of us home, another forty minutes,
and back (a second half hour) with the keys to our car. And this, after a full
day of work, a two-hour meeting and another nearly two hours of generosity.
Only after she waited to assure herself that the car would start (it had been
parked in an area of some uncertainty as to its safety and security), did she
turn for home, another forty minutes away.

While I was expressing my gratitude, in the drive to
pick up my wife, I heard her say, “Well, these things happen, and I only hope
someone would do the same thing for me some day, if I were in a similar
situation.”

Slogans like ‘paying it forward,’ ‘passing it on,’ and
‘a little kindness goes a long way’ float like shimmering clouds across the
horizons of our consciousness every day. We hear about people rescuing trapped
people in Mexico City, following a horrible earth quake, and others showing up
uninvited to help victims of tropical storms and hurricanes in Houston and Puerto
Rico, the Virgin Islands, Dominica and the Florida Keys when real
life-threatening trouble confronts vulnerable people. And we might text a
donation to the Red Cross. Or when a raging fire overwhelms a town like Fort
McMurray, neighbours who previously did not know each other are suddenly thrust
into a needed closeness, compassion and generosity that would have been
undisclosed without the emergency.

Conversely, our conventional attitude would indicate,
at least to a visitor from Mars, that we expect our leaders to exercise a kind
of muscular and even combative attitude, when, for example, a 220% tariff is
intemperately imposed on a series of jets by a ‘neighbouring country’ whose
leaders have decided to ‘draw a line in the sand’ on what they consider ‘unfair
treatment’ under a historic trace treaty. “Fighting for jobs” becomes the
battle cry we expect, at least nominally and extrinsically, from our leaders
who, if they fail to “lead,” will have heaps of negative critiques imposed on
their reputations. Emergencies of all kinds, some of them “man-made” and others
from “mother nature” and some from a combination of both, abound, and the
attitude we seem to take in our public discourse and in our conventional
water-cooler conversations is also combative.

Nevertheless, we also all know (and we know it so
deeply in our bones and in our finely-tuned moral and ethical compass) that our
public posture can and will lead only to more of the same from those we are
directing our venom toward. And it is not just our venom that generates the
return of its own kind; it is also our indifference, our detachment, our
“objectivity” and our fear that our “help” will be considered invasive,
presumptuous, aggressive and overbearing. Like begets like; hate begets hates,
indifference begets indifference, and withdrawal and distance magnetize their
own in return. This principle applies to every stage of the human drama. It
applies to the parent who so vehemently and too often violently “punishes” a
child’s aberrant behaviour, a teacher who over-reacts to a student’s stepping
out of line, a boss’s time-off without pay when conditions set by the employer
contributed to the mis-step.

The principle (did it originate in physics?) that for
every force there is an equal and opposite reaction, seems more readily
recognized, acknowledged and accepted when the matter concerns some kind of
physical energy. Well, it is not rocket science to postulate that a similar
kind of dynamic is discernible in human relations, even if many wilfully or
innocently ignore its power.

To be sure,
there are legitimate caveats when the compassion/generosity/empathy and
political opportunism of governments and social service agencies are the
source. The danger in each of those situations is that a growing number will
come to consider such “social justice” as their right and their entitlement,
come to rely on it, and even twist themselves and their stories to “fit” the
criteria so that their dependence deepens. And, predictably, the resentment of
those hardworking, law-abiding, quietly compliant taxpayers grows in
conjunction and in concert with the abuses.

Although we try valiantly to keep our public and private
lives separate and apart, there is little doubt that we persistently fail.
Whatever happened in our early life, especially when it was traumatic, abusive,
neglectful, abandoned, or isolated for whatever ‘reasons’ or ‘explanations’ has
a half-life that might be compared with the half-life of radioactive iodine
(the kind that is used to quell an overactive thyroid gland). It really never
“dies” until we stop breathing. Sometimes our “pain” finds vindictive
expression when we least expect it, and are least able and willing to
acknowledge and to deal with it. It embarrasses us; it unites us to every other
human on the planet; it demands to be heard, acknowledge, and healed….and that
process, whether it is considered a psychological one, a spiritual one, a
personal reconciliation one, or even a private gift of the imagination in
answer to the question, “What would I do today if I were in the same
situation?” discloses our shared and indentifying truth, that we have all
suffered, and that the suffering is our gateway to new insights and gift of new
wisdom, maturity and a life lived at a very different and rewarding level than
we knew previously.

Reflecting on how we would act today in a situation
that originally resulted in trauma can give light to our growth, and to the
potential “pain” of those who inflicted that original pain or injustice. It can
and will also confirm our shared humanity. Our prisons are populated with men
and women who have so far been unable (unwilling, unsupported) to find a more
healthy relationship with their woundedness. Our social service agencies, too,
have files filled with narratives of emotional issues that began in early life.
Our school populations, apparently increasingly, have issues for which the
professional staff and faculty have been clearly under-prepared to cope with
adequately. (Of course, there are a small number of people whose genetic code
impairs their emotional,, intellectual and social growth.)

In fact, the rising issue of public service workers
(police, fire, paramedics, medical profession, social workers, teachers) having
to confront emotional and behavioural issues for which they have only a token
of preparation is going to have a significant impact on our worker compensation
budgets, as well as on our post-secondary curricula, in many academic
disciplines. Similarly, the rising issue of wounded individuals not being able
to discern when their woundedness from their early lives is impacting the
public budgets (and the pocketbooks of all taxpayers) is going to continue to
grow as we struggle with how to deal with it, without breaking personal
confidentiality and private security issues.

An anonymous agency, against which to find “justice”
previously denied, withheld, and replaced with the anger and resentment (and
the unbounded need for control) has to pay an inordinate price for the acumulation of these injustices. Mis-directed anger and revenge costs
individuals, agencies and the public purse generally more than we have so far
taken into account. We all have injustices that have left scars on our psyches,
imposed often by those who “loved” us (or so they said and thought and even
believed) and yet….and we have also expressed those “resentments” in our
personal and professional lives, without recognizing their source or their
impact.

There is in our minds a field of both wish-fulfilment dreams
(like the ‘angel’ stories above) and the other kind, avoidance visions of
injustice tilting one way and then the other. Our familiarity with the plethora
of injustices we have experienced and those we witness daily too often seems to
wash away and to minimize the importance of those acts of human kindness,
generosity, compassion and reaching out. The time it “takes” to reach out a
helping hand also serves to restrain our better impulses.

We have so blinded ourselves by the notion that we
must not be taken advantage of, that we must not be “used” and that we must not
stretch ourselves out of our comfort zone, because….well because of so many
excuses like:

·if
he wasn’t so stupid he would not have lost his keys, or

·if
she had taken the car to a more reputable mechanic, or,

·I
really don’t know this person so I had better be careful in reaching out a
helping hand…or,

·I
don’t really care about their plight and

·there
are public services that’s/he can find to address this situation.

We are, each of us, a compendium of rationalizations,
excuses and avoidances on a daily, hourly and even minute-by-minute basis…in
order to protect and preserve our “confidence” and our self-satisfied and self-assured
reputation that we can do this alone…

Nevertheless, there is a compelling force from our
public media and the discourse over those details that puts barbed wire tightly
and narrowly around our hopes and expectations for our shared future in harmony.
We continue to meet people whose “hopes” for mankind have dwindled to a dust
ball in a hurricane wind, unlikely to survive. Yet we all know that without
hope, kindness, generosity, compassion and the extension of ourselves that
gives energy, meaning and purpose to our own lives, we contribute to a
collective spiral of negativity that like a vacuum sucks even more hopes and
dreams into oblivion.

Of course, there are millions on the ‘right’ who will
protest that all of these traumas make us stronger, and more resilient and
thereby more ready to meet other crises in our lives. That argument includes
border walls, gutted social programs, a jungle of ‘survivors of the fittest’
and the kind of invisible social engineering that favours the powerful. They
will also argue that kindness, from both private and public sources, breeds softness,
complacency, laziness and a dependency on the public purse. The evidence,
however, points in the opposite direction: that those who are helped when in
distress are not only deeply grateful and moved to emulate their benefactors,
but their stories ripple through the coffee shops, around the water coolers and
into the locker and board rooms, the classrooms and entertainment dramas like a
persistent wave of light, hope and promise.

Children who are raised in a home defined by meanness
and detachment, withdrawal and unrealistic demands are more likely to generate ‘social’
turbulence later than those whose early life is supported not merely fiscally,
but more importantly emotionally and spiritually. Children whose early life is
stained with loneliness, coldness, and the desperate need to ‘prove’ to their parents
their “ambition” (really to embolden their parents’ good name and reputation)
know intimately the desert in which their spirits dry up, without knowing fully
why they live in barren lands. Classrooms, too, dominated by mentors whose openness
and willingness to get to know their students, beyond their capacity to
demonstrate “skill development and proficiency, will nurture a sense of
adventure, and a sense of wellness that is needed to provide stability and a reliable
base for future risk taking.

And, ironically, and completely counter-intuitive to
the macho, combative, rugged individualism of contemporary political and
corporate culture, the real signs of human and cultural growth and development
are not to be found in the range and the depth of our missile development, our
deep internet capacity to spy on our enemies, our road-rage, our boardroom
competitive intrigue nor in our capacity for mean and angry vindictiveness,
revenge and dominance. Our finest and most longed-for growth can and will come
from a focus on a different horizon:

·the
vista of honest acknowledgement of our having hurt others,

·our
deep and authentic steps to reconcile with our enemies,

·our
reaching a helping hand to those in need, and

·our
strengthening the muscles and the habits of compassion, empathy and shared
vulnerability

And, clearly our political leaders, and our “thought-leaders”
are marching to a very different, martial, and entrapping drum…as we engage in,
enable or innocently foster a wave of individual and cultural self-sabotage.